incoherence, nor even distorted perceptions, as of a dream-life occupying the somnolent imagination for months, and therefore all the more hard to reconcile with realities. She is self-possessed, but unobtrusive, easily managed, and betraying only natural emotion; she persists in maintaining that the whole period of the apparent unconsciousness is a complete blank to her recollection. She is grateful for her recovery, but manifests no craving for sympathy, and no tendency, as yet, to revert to any morbid condition of despondency, such as was described at the commencement of the attack. In connection with this last point, although there is no evidence of her having been personally insane, it is not to be denied that her family history contains strong presumptions of a hereditary predisposition bearing in that direction.” These cases must not be confounded with the examples of _lucid lethargy_, to which allusion has been made in a previous chapter. Somnambulic lethargy is a condition in which the cerebrum is wholly inert. In lucid lethargy, although there is complete loss of general sensibility and of the power of voluntary motion, the field of consciousness is continually enlightened by perceptions derived from one or more of the special senses, so that the subject is conscious of much that transpires in his immediate neighborhood. These two forms of lethargy sometimes alternate in the experience of the same individual, constituting a portion of the indefinitely varied manifestations of hystero-epilepsy. Grasset relates the case[77] of a little girl, ten years old, who suffered with various forms of hysteria, which were finally replaced by attacks of stupor, lasting several hours. After a time these crises of “nervous sleep” were transformed into more ordinary attacks of somnambulism, in which, “although the child’s eyes are shut, she sees and hears everything during the crises, knows who comes into the room by their step and walk. If anything unpleasant is said to her, or if they threaten to wet her, or make her smell something, she gets angry, and pushes everything violently away that is offered to her. She replies by signs to all questions, and if she wants anything, asks for it by gesture: if she wants to drink, she puts her finger to her lips as if in the act of sucking, and if not understood, becomes irritated, gets up, and leads the father or mother to the sideboard or cupboard, where the things she wants are, and always with the eyes shut. She is able to go through the whole house, I do not say quite alone, because they do not allow her to walk alone, but with help, and she directs the way wherever she wishes to go. During the crises she even sometimes amuses herself with a little dog, which she makes jump over a stick resting on the cross-bars of two chairs opposite each other; and according as she wishes the dog to jump higher or lower, she moves the stick to the lower or higher bars of the chairs, and that with eyes always